Documentaries on Gentrification

Cities across California are booming with investment and opportunity; these dramatic changes are shifting demographics and displacing historically vibrant communities. City Rising is a multi-platform documentary series examining gentrification and its historical roots, economic role, and social consequences. City Rising illuminates the journey of California's neighborhoods fighting gentrification and advocating for responsible development.

Simply put, this profoundly compelling and thought-provoking documentary is the best case study available of the social and human consequences of urban gentrification in contemporary America. Filmed over a four-year period in Columbus, Ohio, "Flag Wars" explores with eye-opening candor and unforgettable poignancy the effects on a long-established black neighborhood when gay white professionals move into and begin to transform the area. ...

My Brooklyn follows director Kelly Anderson's journey, as a Brooklyn gentrifier, to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood. The film documents the redevelopment of Fulton Mall, a bustling African-American and Caribbean commercial district that - despite its status as the third most profitable shopping area in New York City - is maligned for its inability to appeal to the affluent residents who have come to live around it. ...

This documentary explores the complexities and contradictions of gentrification and life after the era of "the ghetto." It powerfully illustrates how government policies and market forces combine to destroy and rebuild neighborhoods. Some embrace new investment at first, but few are left standing when new money moves in and old residents find themselves priced out.

A definition for "Gentrification"

Gentrification

The combination of demographic and economic changes accompanying sustained reinvestment in inner urban areas, although it has also been used in rural contexts (see rural gentrification). By implication, the social character of the neighbourhood changes, affecting shops, restaurants, places of worship, and public spaces. Gentrification in its initial narrow sense of the occupation and renovation or upgrading of dwellings in working-class inner city neighbourhoods by the middle-classes, was identified by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964, based on her observations in Islington, North London. A broader sense of urban transformation was elaborated by Neil Smith based on the experience of New York, especially the Lower East Side, in the 1980s. Defined more as a return of capital investment than simply a change in the class position of residents, this interpretation encompasses new building, planning, and tax code changes, changes in urban political government, new forms of consumption, and wider cultural shifts linked with neoliberalism (see creative class).

The gentrification of small villages and towns in rural areas, as well as the restoration of individual dwellings. Traditionally, gentrification has been considered a highly urban process, particularly relating to large towns and cities. The same processes of gentrification, such as the reinvestment of capital, social upgrading of a locale by incoming higher-income groups, landscape change and upgrading, and displacement of indigenous low-income groups, take place in some rural locations. These locations are usually within commuting distance of larger settlements, or are home to large higher-skilled employers such as higher education institutions, or have developed into vibrant cultural centres, or desirable tourist or retirement destinations.

Introductory reading(s)

As urban job prospects change to reflect a more 'creative' economy and the desire for a particular form of 'urban living' continues to grow, so too does the migration of young people to cities. Gentrification and gentrifiers are often understood as 'dirty' words, ideas discussed at a veiled distance. Gentrifiers, in particular, are usually a 'they.' ...

Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai reports on the rapidly expanding field of global, urban studies through a unique pairing of six teams of urban researchers from around the world. The authors present shopping streets from each city: New York, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Berlin, Toronto, and Tokyo. They show how they have changed over the years, and how they illustrate globalization embedded in local communities. ...

It is now over 50 years since the term 'gentrification' was first coined by the British urbanist Ruth Glass in 1964, in which time gentrification studies has become a subject in its own right. This Handbook, the first ever in gentrification studies, is a critical and authoritative assessment of the field. ...

A journey to the front lines of the battle for the future of American cities, uncovering the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification--and the lives that are altered in the process. The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. ...

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, proclamations rang out that gentrification had gone global. But what do we mean by 'gentrification' today? How can we compare 'gentrification' in New York and London with that in Shanghai, Johannesburg, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro? This book argues that gentrification is one of the most significant and socially unjust processes affecting cities worldwide today, and one that demands renewed critical assessment. ...

Selected book titles

This book analyses the social and cultural status of high streets in the age of recession and austerity. High streets are shown to have long been regarded as the heart of many communities, but have declined to a state where boarded-up and vacant retail units are a familiar sight in many British cities. The book argues that the policies deemed necessary to revive the fortunes of high streets are often thinly-veiled attacks on the tastes and cultures of the working class. ...

Under contemporary capitalism the extraction of value from the built environment has escalated, a phenomenon working in tandem with other urban processes to lay the foundations for the exploitative processes of gentrification worldwide. Global Gentrifications critically assesses and tests the meaning and significance of gentrification in places outside the usual suspects of the Global North. Informed by a rich array of case studies from cities in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Southern Europe, and beyond, the book illuminates both the geographical generalities and specificities associated with the uneven process of gentrification globally. ...

Green Gentrification looks at the social consequences of urban "greening" from an environmental justice and sustainable development perspective. Through a comparative examination of five cases of urban greening in Brooklyn, New York, it demonstrates that such initiatives, while positive for the environment, tend to increase inequality and thus undermine the social pillar of sustainable development. ...

In Preserving the Old City of Damascus, Totah examines the recent gentrification of the historic urban core of the Syrian capital and the ways in which urban space becomes the site for negotiating new economic and social realities. The book illustrates how long-term inhabitants of the historic quarter, developers, and government officials offer at times competing interpretations of urban space and its use as they vie for control over the representation of the historic neighborhoods. ...

For long-time residents of Washington, DC's Shaw/U Street, the neighborhood has become almost unrecognizable in recent years. Where the city's most infamous open-air drug market once stood, a farmers' market now sells grass-fed beef and homemade duck egg ravioli. On the corner where AM-PM carryout used to dish out soul food, a new establishment markets its $28 foie gras burger. Shaw is experiencing a dramatic transformation, from "ghetto" to "gilded ghetto," where white newcomers are rehabbing homes, developing dog parks, and paving the way for a third wave coffee shop on nearly every block. Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City is an in-depth ethnography of this gilded ghetto. ...

An unflinching chronicle of gentrification in the twenty-first century and a love letter to lost New York by the creator of the popular and incendiary blog Vanishing New York. For generations, New York City has been a mecca for artists, writers, and other hopefuls longing to be part of its rich cultural exchange and unique social fabric. But today, modern gentrification is transforming the city from an exceptional, iconoclastic metropolis into a suburbanized luxury zone with a price tag only the one percent can afford. A Jane Jacobs for the digital age, blogger and cultural commentator Jeremiah Moss has emerged as one of the most outspoken and celebrated critics of this dramatic shift. In Vanishing New York, he reports on the city's development in the twenty-first century, a period of "hyper-gentrification" that has resulted in the shocking transformation of beloved neighborhoods and the loss of treasured unofficial landmarks. ...

In 1964, Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification to describe a redevelopment process in which middle-class professionals were moving to, and changing, London’s working-class neighborhoods. Her prescient work framed numerous themes that would develop into the gentrification debates. Why was gentrification occurring? Why are middle-income people moving to central city neighborhoods? How would this trend affect longtime residents? The specific circumstances of former industrial, emergent global cities in the North and West—notably London and New York—framed the early debates. ...

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